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Bees help restore Sudbury mining site

Retired foreman Wayne Tonelli worked in Sudbury’s nickel mines since he was a teenager, but his new gig is pretty sweet.

That’s because his old boss Vale (formerly Inco) is mining for more than metals these days. The company is in the ‘liquid gold’ business, enlisting thousands of honey bees to help restore a Sudbury landscape blighted by more than a century of nickel and copper mining and smelting.

“I like being outside after 40 years underground,” says Tonelli, now a bee-keeper for the international resources giant as part of a company program to re-green the area that decades back looked like a moonscape.

He carefully tends to seven hives containing 350,000 bees that are used to pollinate the blooming wildflowers the company has planted across 120 acres of unsightly black slag piles formed by waste from the Copper Cliff smelter complex, upon which the massive Superstack chimney sits.

“Bio-diversity is the buzz word in the resource industry these days,” explains Glen Watson, superintendent, reclamation and decommissioning for Vale’s Ontario operations.

Vale also has an underground tree greenhouse, where the company got the seedlings to plant more than 10 million evergreens in the Sudbury area. The year-round underground temperature of 23C is perfect environment for the tree nursery, says Watson, a biologist by trade.

The mining firm also farms fish and to date has released 5,000 rainbow trout and 1,000 walleye into local rivers.

“It’s made a huge difference,” says Watson, who was born in Sudbury and has spent 19 years with the company.

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The bee-keeping business is the latest initiative by Vale, which has spent $10 million since 2006 on its ongoing drive to restore the environment to its natural state — something local communities and governments around the world used to demand but have now come to expect from mining companies.

Watson notes Vale is not the first mining company to enlist bees in their reclamation efforts (Goldcorp has been doing something similar at an old mine tailings property in Timmins). However, he thinks his company has a much bigger colony than most that have tried to start their own.

“The change has been remarkable. Pine trees and a variety of other vegetation now grow in formerly bleak hills,” says Republic of Mining blogger Stan Sudol, who grew up nearby in the 1970s.

“When NASA astronauts visited Sudbury in 1971 to study the geology (of) meteor impact zones, the southern media widely reported that they came due to the region’s resemblance to the moon. Unfortunately, that story still occasionally haunts the community,” notes Sudol.

Since then, both Vale and Glencore (formerly Falconbridge) have reduced sulphur emissions by 92 per cent and the community’s re-greening efforts and expertise have been nationally and globally recognized.

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“It’s esthetically more pleasing to see that than a slag heap,” says Watson. “The waste product hardens to black rock and it’s unsightly. The idea with the bees is that because we plant the area with grass and wildflower mix, we would need bees to pollinate the flowers,” he says.

In turn, the wildflowers provide the bees with nectar and pollen.

Not a lot of honey is produced, but whatever is extracted goes to employees, people who tour the site and the local food bank.

Already an amateur bee-keeper for the last decade, Tonelli was tapped by Vale to get the colony going last spring. The hives are stored in an enclosed, decommissioned cargo trailer to protect the buzzing insects from sub-zero temperatures, snow and honey-loving predators.

“We have a lot of bear problems up here so we’ve got to protect these little guys,” says Tonelli, who is fascinated by bees, which have a declining worldwide population.

“They’re like workers underground. Everyone’s got a job,” he says of the worker bees.

However, they only live for 35 to 45 days in their service to the queen bee. “They literally work themselves to death,” he says.

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